From the course: Sylvia Massy: Unconventional Recording

Exploring Sylvia's unique collection of sound toys

From the course: Sylvia Massy: Unconventional Recording

Exploring Sylvia's unique collection of sound toys

- So I like to make every recording session an adventure. And to do that I have a box full of toys that I'll bring to sessions. And then I'll pull something out when I think it'll help inspire the artist to do something different. To break out of the box that they're in. And so I have some of these things here. For instance, these two boxes I found in Los Angeles when I was there visiting one time. And they're made in India and they actually are Indian drum machines. And this one is a Tahbla. And I'll play it for you. (echoing high pitch drums) It's kind of crusty. And then this one is basically a sitar sound. And if you use them (echoing sitar and drum) both together, and it will create a nice little interlude for someone's song. Maybe? It's a fun thing. Also I like to use guitar pedals for any number of things. Introduce those into a session, and you never know what's gonna happen with the guitar player who's bored with what they've got. I'll give them something. Oh, they want a fuzz sound? Well we've got a super fuzz here. This is fantastic. There's even a fuzz factory. This is made by ZVex. This guy, ZVex, makes pedals up in Minnesota somewhere. He's up in, way up there. And he makes these crazy pedals. He's kind of a mad genius. He made this probe pedal. It's very much like a theremin. You hover your foot over it and it causes the signal to have an envelope or wah kind of sound. Just with your foot instead of actually touching a pedal and doing a wah, you do it with just hovering your foot. Theremins, speaking of theremins, theremins are really fun. This one is a newer one. Actually it was signed by Bob Moog before he passed. It's Moog designed theremin. And you play it like this. I don't have it working right now, so I won't actually plug it in. But this is your volume and this is your pitch. And you play it like this. And you'll see people playing these instruments. It's fantastic and it's a superb time waster if you just want to have fun for a half of a day or maybe not even get anything useful. It's just really fun to have around. Ah, what else do we have here? There's things I like to do with microphones that are unusual. And that, one thing that I started doing is using a hose. I'll use a hose and tape a microphone onto one end and drape the hose underneath a drum kit. And the sound that you get is a great room sound with drums. But it doesn't have all the shrill cymbals in it. So you can use it as an effect or as a replacement for a drum room mic, for better drum recordings. It's really an exciting thing to do. This thing right here, this is a Variac. This changes the voltage that you send to whatever you plug into it. So there's a plug on the back. You plug what ever it is. I'll plug the guitar amp into that. Now I'm going to vary the power going into that amp. And what happens is, if you starve the amp, guitar amp for power, if you turn down the power and you're giving it less power, it causes the amp to work harder. So when someone plays the guitar, it sounds more kind of richer and thicker and more saturated. And it's a really fun tool. You can buy these surplus or you can get a new one. But Variacs are used for all different types of things. This actually belonged to my father, and he was kind of a electronics buff. But the use of it with guitar amplifiers, I was taught by Ross Hogarth who worked with Eddie Van Halen on Van Halen's records. And he says this is the secret of the Van Halen sound, is to use the Variac to starve the guitar amps. So there you go, that's a secret revealed. I learned a lot from the people that I worked with. Another person that was highly influential on my style is Matt Wallace. He taught me how to take snare drums and tape them onto speakers and them mic those speakers, mic the snare, and then run the sound of a recorded snare through that speaker and add what you're recording back into your mix. And it's a fantastic effect. It's called re-amping a snare. And I learned that from him. I learned a lot of techniques from Matt Wallace and several other people that are actually in the book Recording Unhinged. Their stories and techniques are shared. And these are a lot of the things that I learned from them too. But let's see, what else do we have? This is another one that Ross Hogarth shared in the book. And it's the use of passive transformers. Actually Devin Powers was the person who really turned me on to the use of passive transformers. And they're just, they're transformers that were used in telephones in the old telephone systems. And they're just surplus. But if you find these on eBay, and use these across your stereo bus, you get this extra full sound of iron across your mix. And it's a really special sound. And I use it all the time now. I've got a Western Electric unit that I run in my mix all the time. And that was sent to me by Devin Powers. So this is something not many people know about, but this is a really cool thing to do. Also there's some really interesting mics out there. There's new designs using old technology. So this is a, just a regular telephone handset from an old style phone. This was actually from a rotary dial phone. And you can find these in the thrift store, you know, still. But what I did, and this was something my father taught me, is that you take the mouthpiece apart. And inside the mouthpiece you'll find this little button here. And this is a carbon microphone. And you can actually use this just by taking out all the original wiring, and taking a mic cable like this one. Just a regular old mic cable. And wiring it onto the cradle for the carbon button. And then one thing to remember though, in order to power it, it needs to be powered, is you have to add on one side, you'll have to add a little battery. And I've done that here. And I just tucked it into the earpiece because there's room. But I wired this battery right in. It's a double A, so its 1.5 volt battery. And that powers it, so it's a line level microphone. You just plug it in and use it. It's great for doing vocals, effect vocals. It sounds like a telephone, you know? Yes, I'd like to order a pizza. You know. So that's fun. And then this would be an extremely important tool. And this is a toy piano. But for me, I have a toy piano with me, every time I'm working on Pro Tools, because if I need to tune a vocalist, and I need to find out what melody they're trying to sing, I just have this little analog piano right here. (piano tones) And it's ready to tell me what keys I need to, to draw in on my, on my, either Autotune or Melodyne or whatever. If I need to figure out a melody. So I always, always have a toy piano in the studio. And what else? Oh, speakers make fantastic microphones too. This is straight off of a 1950's style drive-in movie. This used to be that you'd go to a drive-in movie. You'd have a big screen there, and you'd be sitting in your car and then you'd pull this into your car and hang it on your window. And this was the sound of the movie. So if you find one of these, it makes a great microphone. You can put it up tot he kick drum (laughs) or the guitar cabinet and just again, reverse engineer it so it's got a quarter inch cable here. And then use a direct box, and you'll get, it acts just like a microphone, a very large microphone. We use these when we're recording drums all the time. Here's one of these kind of home made devices where you take an old speaker, and you wire it backwards so it's actually being used as a microphone. We put that right up in the kick drum. And it sounds just like an 808 style kick. Like a booming kick. So, anyway these are just some of the things that we like to do in the studio. When we go doing recordings, we really, as a producer I want to build in extra time in the budget so that we can have some fun, make some mistakes, you know. And you never know what comes out of it.

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